I had a good laugh at people recommending Ubuntu. I recently installed the very latest Ubuntu on a VM, started the launcher, typed "terminal" ... and looked in utter disbelief as it started showing me random movies and crap from Amazon.

Yes, certainly. I dimly remember HP as being a particularly cruddy install.

The Amazon search in Unity home lens (where you go to launch programs &c) is attempting to be a dynamic search so that results narrow as you type. Network latency means it sort of 'jumps' in groups of letters. Sometimes results corresponding to part of the words you type appear. This can produce 'interesting' results.

Give me a break. `sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping` or as the other replier comments, a single check-switch will disable this. It clearly is NOTHING compared to the daily bullshit in Windows.

What a self righteous jerk. The article is about the regular bullshit that Windows users go through. A single choice made to bolster revenue of an open source project is vastly different than a system that simply hasn't been innovated on for the past 20 years and just sucks in a lot of places.

If you can spend 20 seconds of effort and fix breaking issues like installation standardization, or (un)installation cleanup, or package management, or the new security system that manages to suck harder than GateKeeper... then you can come back and talk down to me.

edit: even just drivers. Do you know how frustrating it is to be given a laptop as a gift from Microsoft only to find that the drivers are difficult to locate, impossible to install without several Admin-level command line statements and a reboot and several scary warnings, and that even after installing them, several of them were just disasterously bad. Fedora, everything works out of the box. Ubuntu, everything works out of the box.

Explanation for those outside the Ubuntu bubble: 12.10 has had an Amazon search integrated into the main Unity lens, and this is enabled by default. Early in the release of 12.10 a graphical 'kill switch' was added to system settings. Before that, you had to uninstall a package manually from the command line.

As I commented up the screen, I hope Canonical don't alienate their users with (any) more of this sort of thing as switching between GNU/Linux distributions is relatively easy.

You didn't get the point of this comment and article at all. The question is not in the quantity of things, it's that a hardware vendor (or here, distribution maintaner) would think so lowly of his customers that hes ready to just shove advertisements and annoyances into their face by default.

And theres no magic switch to get them back to a point where they recognize that users matter.

No. On a daily basis, I don't run into walls in Linux. In Windows, I do regularly. The issues discussed in this article stem from poor design in Windows and legacy shit that hasn't been updated. Just insert my other reply here, it's still perfectly applicable. If you can fix these issues at all yourself then they're not issues.